Bullet Blog // Managing Fear When Training Something New

Q: I would like to know how to approach teaching my horse flying changes without the fear of being a flying angel and my horse taking gigantic leaps in the air at the same time as he learns.

Let’s start this discussion with one of the key questions to consider when it comes to any fear-based concern we have about our horses or training; is this fear valid?

The thing is, if the very real potential exists for something to happen that is outside of your ability to competently or safely deal with, your fear is providing you with a legitimate warning signal that you need to find some way to mediate or navigate your way through.

Does that mean that it’s the end of the road for the goal or dream that you have in mind?

Absolutely not.

What it does mean, however, is there is some leg work that needs to happen in order for you and your horse to be able to emotionally and physically manage the next step you have in mind.

That aside, let’s dive in on the assumption that there is no safety issue or concern that is getting in the way, but that the fear is instead tied to an anticipation anxiety about future imagined possibilities and a strong connection to what it is we don’t want to happen.

Consider some of the words that you have used to describe the situation- flying angel, gigantic leaps- and sit with them for a moment. When you say those words to yourself, what comes to mind? For me, I see a vision of my horse cavorting around the arena and me being catapulted through the air. No matter what the specifics of your projection, we create a mental movie of the experience which signals our body to respond in a specific way. While we are able to consciously discern between a projection that is real and imagined, our unconscious mind does not have the same ability. Your unconscious mind gathers all of its information via the sensory systems, and as a consequence, a vividly imagined scenario registers the same way unconsciously and physiologically as if it were happening in real time. That’s why you can start to feel worried, concerned, anxious or afraid just thinking about something, even if you are very far removed from the situation you are thinking about.

The other thing that happens is when you consistently bring to mind what you don’t want to happen, you strengthen the neural pathways associated with those thoughts and make it an easier thought stream to default too.

The beginning of anything new begins with your intention, which is the mental and emotional blueprint of what you would like to see happen in the physical. To elaborate on this a little further, jump over and watch this video on my YouTube channel– it will give you a snapshot of why it’s important to focus on what it is you want as opposed to what it is you are trying to avoid (enter the flying angels!).

What would you like to see happen when you start your flying change training? What will that look like? How will it feel?

Secondly, break the training trajectory down into a series of steps. The eventual movement will come together as a consequence of all the basic elements working seamlessly; how many steps exist between the point you are now and the point where you could feasibly ask for the change?

Set both of you up for success. Manage your mindset by training your thoughts to anticipate success and put together an achievable training plan that keeps you out of overwhelm.

xx Jane

Want to submit your own question? Bullet blogs are quick fire answers to questions you have submitted. This is your chance to share your thoughts with me and for me to give you some ideas about how to proceed. Click here to submit your question! 

Hitting The Glass Ceiling: Understanding Your Success Threshold

When we think about comfort zones, what often springs to mind are all the things that we do our best to avoid. Some examples of this are getting physically hurt, being upset, embarrassed, feeling like we are in over our heads or avoiding situations where we think we may be put under more pressure than we’re happy to handle in the moment. All of these things exist in bottom area or lower reaches of our comfort bubble, and in our preoccupation for doing our utmost to avoid them, we’ve forgotten that we also have an upper limit to our comfort zone that dictates how much success, happiness and positive results we are willing to allow.

In short, the more elevated reaches of our comfort zone dictate how much good stuff we can handle and when we hit this threshold, we can sabotage our constructive efforts and results to cycle us back down to the comfortable limits of what we already know.

I agree that on the face of it, this seems completely nonsensical. Give it to me, you shout to yourself. I can handle all of the success! But the truth of it is, well, you can’t. None of us can. “All the success” feels nice in theory, but when it comes to practice, we need to be aware that acclimatizing ourselves to things going well, to receiving positive results or even the accepting the most basic flow of good energy coming our way- our ability to receive a compliment- takes practice.

You see, discomfort is indiscriminate. It’s not concerned about growth or failure.  It’s not concerned about “good” discomfort (like success) or “bad” discomfort (like being physically hurt). The primary concern of your comfort zone is to keep you within the confines of what is familiar and keep you away from the danger of uncertainty and the unknown. Lack of certainty and the unknown feels risky and dangerous; consequently, we make decisions, engage in behaviours and take action based on what feels known to us, even if what is known does not equate to what we want.

Here are some examples of success thresholds that I’ve discussed working with riders in my membership program, JoyRide:

Example 1:

A rider in competition finally starts to experience the results that she’d always dreamed of. Shortly after, she finds herself getting really busy at home. The busy-ness she creates stops her riding as much as she needs to and she finds herself pulling out of competitions as a consequence of feeling unprepared.

After digging beneath the surface, we discovered that her success was challenging to her social circle. Winning was making her “different” to her friends (who were still struggling to achieve the same results). She felt like maybe they would think she was “full of herself” or “better than them”, and so sabotaged her results through lack of preparedness and half hearted effort.

Example 2:

A JoyRider I worked with found herself not riding consistently- despite wanting to and having every opportunity to do so. Once we broke it down, she was concerned that if she rode consistently, people would expect her to do “more” with her horse, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that. As a consequence, she had stopped herself from riding in the first place.

Example 3:

People pleasing or criticism can be a big one. Not allowing yourself to be yourself, to do what you love or put yourself out there can be symptomatic of going out of your way to avoid criticism. It’s a convenient excuse to keep ourselves small as we attempt to shield ourselves from negative feedback or criticism.

All of these are examples of upper limits or hitting our success threshold. We reach the ceiling of how much we are familiar with or feel worthy and deserving of and the only option from there is to cycle back down.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. While the specifics are always individually dependent, it’s important to recognize when the feelings of discomfort creep in and to understand that they aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Constantly reframing and elasticizing the edges of our comfort zone involves being willing to get uncomfortable, especially when it comes to breaking through the limits of your own glass ceiling.

xx Jane

Keeping it Simple! The #horsetimechallenge

It’s not uncommon to find yourself in the place where everything feels like it’s getting on top of you. I’ve been talking about this a lot over the past week (you can check out my blog on Emotional Busy-ness here and a Facebook post I wrote yesterday on being “Procrasto-busy”), motivated by personal experience and also a series of conversations I’ve been having with people who feel exactly the same way. The thing is, periodically checking it to see where you are unnecessarily complicating life is a really important habit to get into. Often times, things work until they don’t, and if we don’t create space to look back and see what’s working and what’s not, it’s easy to continue on a path that no longer serves us for no other reason other than habit.

Although it may seem like a stretch, all of this impacts our riding. A full head or a full schedule either robs you of the ability to be present or prevents you from making time for your horsing pursuits in the first place; no necessarily a big deal short term, but the cumulative effects can be immobilizing and depressing!

This week in JoyRide, my membership program, I issued a “Simplification Challenge”! How can you make things easier on yourself, I asked them. What do you need to cut out, change up or introduce to experience more of what you want and less of what you don’t want?

A friend emailed me and said she was really keen to go through this process but felt stuck on where to start, and if you feel the same, here are some questions to trot through your brain space to get you started (JoyRiders, I’m going to make a template for you of these and post it on the member’s site later!).

What makes you happy?

Yup, seems obvious, but how often to you ask yourself this question? I noted down all the things that made me happy and then looked at how many of those things I was including in my day. Your list will naturally be really specific to you but mine included working with my horses, yoga, meditation and spending time with my family. When I intentionally weave these things into my week, I feel balanced and taken care of, but when I start to miss some or all of them out on a regular basis, things start to go a bit skew whiff.

How can you include more of what makes you happy in your day?

Taking time for the things that are important to us is something that needs to be intentionally cultivated. Time will not make itself available to you. If you are waiting for space to “open up” (when this thing is done, when the kids are at this point, the list goes on!), there will be always something ready to fill the gap. The rule of thumb: Get in there! You need to carve time out for yourself and honour that time with the same sense of commitment you would do to something else that feels non-negotiable.

What’s draining you right now?

If you feel a bit blah, or you feel like your energy is being drained but you’re not sure exactly why (or you know exactly why but aren’t doing anything to change it!) look at what could or might be causing that. Are you saying yes to things you want to say no too? Are your boundaries shaky or non-existent so that you find yourself being pulled in twenty different directions at once.

Step One: Get Clear

Step Two: Identify the energy leaks

Step Three: Take action to repair, change or adjust them

Looking at all of the above, what can you cut out, simplify or change in some way to streamline your days?

Get ruthless on protecting your own energy and resources. If it feels selfish, consider this. If you involve yourself in something, you want to be able to give yourself to that 100%. Saying yes but meaning no is unfair to you and unfair to the person or thing you are saying yes to. We want action on decisions that we not only pay lip service too, but that our hearts are behind.

The other thing… if you don’t look after yourself, you aren’t operating in a sustainable way. Sure, sometimes, we need to go above and beyond to get things done, but for the majority of what we do, we need to make sure that our modus operandi is a sustainable one.

How am I going to act on this?

No use writing it down if you don’t act on it! How are you going to take your discoveries and implement them? What can you do now to get started?

If you want to join the me this week, I’m going to be running a #horsetimechallenge over on Instagram. Post how you are going to simplify your life (and make more horse time), use the hash tag and we can follow along and share in the awesomeness!

Can’t wait to hear how you get on!

xx Jane

Focus! Emotional Busy-ness and Working Memory

A little while ago, I did a Facebook Live on emotional busy-ness, but the topic is such an important (and common!) one, however, that I wanted to tie all of the points together in a neat little package here also!

When we feel tired, unfocused or like we have a lot going on, we typically look to all at the things which occupy us in a physical sense for what might be draining us. For most of us, though, it’s unlikely we are really overdoing it physically (if anything, the majority of us probably wish we were more active). What is actually drying up our internal reserves is the workings of a busy mind.

Emotional busy-ness is something that we all dip and out of periodically, but if we aren’t mindful of how we are managing our focus and creating space in the day for downtime and reflection, it can become our day-to-day modus operandi. Not only does this cause us to carry a feeling of “rush” with us, but it also impacts our ability to stay present, to focus on the task at hand and to be able to manage our mindset under pressure.

I remember feeding the horses one afternoon and noticing the feeling of hurry and busy-ness that was sitting in my stomach. Like so many of us, there’s a lot that I need to pack into a day. Family, work, horses, things that need to be taken care of as part of the daily schedule- it’s easy to get to the stage where you feel like you are pinging from one thing to the next with little to no time in between. On this particular occasion though, a little voice piped up inside my head:

“You know, feeding the horses is going to take you about 45 minutes. Whether you do that with a rushed feeling or do that with a relaxed feeling, the time you take is going to be the same.”

This was definitely a light bulb moment for me. There is so much that we do that is always going to take the time that it’s going to take. Being mindful of your internal climate and ensuring that you take the time to check in, take a breath and adjust ensures you aren’t cultivating an energy that is not only futile (after all, feeling busy and rushed does little to actually make you more efficient or shorten the time needed to do the task in any way) but is literally exhausting. Your nervous system is working in a state of chronic activation, which is similar to turning the tap on of your emotional reserves and forgetting to turn it off.

Emotional busy-ness also has immediate consequences when it comes to working with our horses. If there’s one things that’s essential, not only to your mindset, but to your ability to be responsive as opposed to reactive as a trainer and rider (and as soon as we get in the saddle or pick up on the lead rope we are both of these, whether we formally identify with them or not) it’s the ability to be present. Emotional busy-ness pulls us out of the present and positions us mentally in the past or in the future, depending on the thought process at the time. There are many ramifications of this training wise, but what I would like to speak specifically to now is how mind clutter affects your working memory and how THIS affects your ability to focus.

Working memory is your general capacity horse power. It’s what determines what you need to have front of mind to be able to perform a particular task, and it also determines what you need to block out. The thing with working memory is that it is influenced by both internal and external factors. For instance, if you are having a riding lesson or receiving instruction of some sort, the verbal information that you are receiving and integrating from the outside takes up some of your working memory bandwidth.

On an internal level, conversations that you are having with yourself- as well as doubts, worry and rumination- will also compete for the same working memory space.

For the sake of example, let’s say that you have ten points of working memory available to you at any one time. To focus with the degree of intention and concentration necessary to do what you want to do with your horse to a level that satisfies you, let’s pretend that you need 7 points of working memory. In the case of emotional busy-ness, the pre-exisiting brain clutter may be taking a standard 5 points of your working memory hard drive. A simplistic example but you can see how important it is to be able to quieten your mind and your brain chatter in order to not only focus, but to process and integrate new information (in the case of a lesson) or ride to the best of your ability when the pressure is on (in the case of a competition or riding outside your comfort zone). If we don’t have enough working memory available we will block out or delete the “excess” information, simply because we don’t have the ability to process it.

The specific tools for managing this is outside the scope of what this blog covers, but if we want more focus and more mental space, it’s important to look at how we are cultivating both of those qualities in the day to day, when we are away from our horses as much as when we are with them.

Over the next few days, be mindful of your internal climate. Do you carry with you the feeling of rush or busy? How present are you when you are working with your horse? What can you do to cultivate a more relaxed focus?

“At the very end of my exhalation, I found myself”.

xx Jane

Interview with Horsemanship Radio

I was fortunate enough to be interviewed a couple of weeks ago by Debbie Loucks for Horsemanship Radio. The episode is now live and I would love for you to check it out! We talked about WEG, horsemanship, confidence, mindset and everything in between.

Annnd……. who better to be paired with in the same episode than Warwick Schiller ????

You can listen to the radio interview via this link.

I hope you enjoy it!

xx Jane

Live with Katy Negranti

A recording of a Facebook Live Session with Katy Negranti. Katy has come to be one of my closest friends after we spent a month together as part of Team Australia for the World Equestrian Games. Aside from being a super awesome human, Katy is also one of the best horsewoman I know (she trains horses full time at her ranch in California and won the Extreme Mustang Makeover in 2009)- I’m constantly asking questions and having conversations about everything horse training related. We chatter about all things horses and more in this live session!

Beautiful person, you can do hard things.

“Every horse is a therapy horse, some of them are just freelancing”.

The last two weeks, the only contact that I have had with my horses has been to feed and muck out in the most efficient time possible. I have paused briefly to fling my arms around Dee’s big, brown neck and inhale deeply, to thank him and feel grateful for his steady presence but aside from that, my focus has been elsewhere.

Despite their brevity, those moments have been healing and yearned for. The outside world seems particularly sensual right now. Anyone who has spent a block of time inside a hospital ward feels this I’m sure. As you walk out, the first thing to hit you is the air. The need to inhale deeply becomes a compulsion. You wonder how you have missed this before, how you could be so flippant and dismissive of something so glorious, so enlivening as fresh air. It feels so encompassing you almost believe you could collapse into its support.

The colours of the trees, grass seems luminous. The way the world bustles on despite the fact that yours has stopped is simultaneously jarring yet comforting. How can they? You think, and “thanks goodness”, you sigh.

This has been my experience the last two weeks, and it’s one I have decided to share not for the experience in and of itself, which is neither appropriate nor called for, but to extend a loving hand to those in a similar position and say, it’s ok. You can do hard things. And this is how I have chosen to find my way back- to return from a trauma and throw the stones ahead of me on the path so that I may step on them.

Some days back, I had a phone call that makes your heart drop out of your chest. Since then, my world (and the world of many others) has revolved around hospitals and doctors and assuring the well-being of some very important little people was tended to. It’s been traumatic, consuming and confronting, and at times, beautiful, and in order to give it the attention it needed, everything else has stopped.

And now, I find myself needing to reenter the fold, to re-begin, and I’ve been grappling for a start point. I can see the other side- the place I need and want to be- but to leap to that place without an acknowledgement of what has come and been seems wrong and disrespectful. My rocket has been orbiting and I was unsure how to re-enter the atmosphere.

So how do you do that? How do you find a start point when the vortex of life spins you so fast you don’t know where to start?

Taking care of what needs to be taken care of

A lot of stress is created by the things that need to be taken care of not being taken care of. When you are pulled into an emergency or trauma, the cloud of worry about the basics of life- looking after your family, work, horses, tending to the basic needs of life- can be overwhelming and stressful. Once the space arises to start to get some order back (or to create some in the midst of total disorder) prioritizing the essentials is the place to begin. What has been neglected and requires your attention? Who can you delegate tasks to?

Sometimes, the feeling that you need to do everything will stop you doing anything. Pick one thing and start from there. I felt a desperate pull to fling myself back into work but I knew that my head nor my heart were ready to do so in a way that meant I could give it my full attention and operate with the kind of integrity that’s important to me.

So I stopped, hugged my kids, my husband and my horses and allowed myself a couple of days to process, ensuring that the absolute basics were covered; I was truthful about my circumstances to those I had commitments to, cut myself some slack, and reminded myself that I would make up for this time just as soon as I was able.

You can’t do everything but you can do something. What’s the one thing you can do right now that would be the most helpful for you?

What do you need to feel good?

A tendency I have (which I know is a tendency I share with many) is to overextend myself and attempt to pour from an empty cup. In an emergency, sometimes it’s what’s needed. We do have to extend ourselves beyond what we would recognize as our comfortable capacity and all of us are willing to do so. What’s important to recognize, however, is that this modus operandi is neither sustainable nor helpful in the medium to long term. Understanding what you need to feel good- and seeking it out- is the kindest thing you can do for yourself and for those around you. If you are going to be there for the long haul, you need to make sure that you advocate for yourself as much as you do for others.

With that in mind, what do you need to stay resourceful and to feel that you can sustain this situation? Do you need time out, even for a few minutes? Do you need to grab your boots and go for a ride (how to re-start your horsing life is going to be the topic of my next blog!)?

Give yourself permission to look after yourself. It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity. And the responsibility lies with you to make sure you are taken care of.

Trust in the flow

I’m not going to mince words; sometimes life is really tough. It can seem hard and unfair and not right and baffling and cruel and beautiful all at once. What you focus on and where you place your attention is a choice that sometimes you will be called to make not only every day, but every minute. Find your anchor point.

If there’s one thing I know about emotions it’s that they are cyclic. Nothing is fixed or constant. The feelings will shift and move and you will find yourself in a different place sooner or later, even if your heart is bruised and battered in the process.

Fighting against what you feel will only add another layer of suffering to a situation that is already largely out of your control. Sitting in the discomfort and allowing it to move through you is an act of bravery and allows the necessary emotional alchemy to occur.

You can do hard things. Stay with it. See it through to the other side. And don’t be afraid.

xx Jane 

Negotiating The Resistance Line

One of the things I’ve been mindful of over the first few rides with Dee is negotiating the resistance line; where pressure is applied, there’s an increase in energy in response, and you begin an energetic conversation between too little, too much, and the point of resistance where both openness and understanding come to a standstill. More often than not, this requires attention to detail. For example, in teaching the cue to “go”, I first start with my intention (holding the ideal version of what I want to create in my mind), gently apply pressure with my legs (usually in conjunction with a vocal cue) and then wait for the response.

The first few times, I applied too much, too soon. I felt a brace arise- the resistance point. It’s physical yes, but it’s mainly mental. Concern, apprehension on the part of the horse- what does that mean and what do I need to do to protect myself? And too much “ask” on the part of the rider (me). What’s important to remember is that pressure is something defined by your horse’s response, not by our own feelings about what is too much and too little. What could be considered a light cue to us, may be too much for our horse according to the mood, moment, environment or level of understanding. It’s a dance of application, reflection and adjustment.

By dropping back and looking for a more refined response, you can begin to negotiate this line to elasticize your comfort zones and increase understanding without entering into conflict. For instance, if I apply a leg aid and ask for forward, expecting a full step at walk- although a seemingly small ask- may be too much in the beginning. For a horse just learning, we might look for a shift in weight, a change in dynamic that suggests their thoughts were forward if nothing else. If we can build and release from that point, I believe we can maximise learning and minimize the need for conflict.

When it comes to our own learning as riders and horse people, it’s important that we become aware of our own line of resistance and dance with it accordingly. I work with the principle of intentional practice- of seeking out the elements of riding and horsemanship that challenge me and actively incorporating it into my training.

Massaging the resistance line- the point at which you feel a physical and mental brace to the task at hand- requires us to be connected and in tune; available to listen to our instinct and intuition and be mindful of when feelings of apprehension arise in relation to an activity, request or offer. It often manifests as the catch point; the point where your desire is squashed down by your concern. The point where you “catch” yourself; you want to say yes, but instead you say no. Where you wish you could, but you feel you can’t. Where you no longer feel resourceful, willing but instead defensive and protective. Resistance.

Negotiating the resistance line, elasticizing the limits of your comfort zone and maintaining open-ness to learning and growth is a dance of peaks and troughs; it’s applying pressure, noticing the rise in tension, sustaining the tension momentarily and then releasing. Your ability to sustain the tension- to relax into what concerns you- comes with the normalization of the experience, with you seeking to include that which you have resistance to as part of what you do until you feel the hard edges dissolve. What you have then is no longer resistance, but acceptance, a new kind of normal.

xx Jane

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The Application of the Aids

The aids and the application of the aids is something that’s frequently discussed and written about. In physical terms, there is no such thing as a universally understood or applied aid; there is only the aid that you have taught your horse to understand. For instance, placing your outside leg behind the girth and inside leg on the girth- an aid commonly taught and applied in English riding to ask for canter- is not understood by your horse to mean canter unless it’s been established as such. The first step, then, in ensuring that you and your horse have a clear line of communication is to ensure that he knows the answer to your questions and you have established a common language between you both.

 

If I were to ask you what first comes to mind when you think of “applying the aids”, chances are you would jump immediately to the physical; to how it is you organize your body and what prompts you apply in tangible terms to influence the direction, position or energy of your horse. Thinking of aids only in these terms, however, limits us; it prevents us from transcending a line of communication that begins at the most subtle level, and for any physical manifestations to arise from that place.

The application of the aids does not begin with the physical; it begins with thought and intention. Developing an awareness of and stepping into the practice of fine tuning your intention opens a world of potential that maximizes you and your horse’s creative possibilities.

Step 1: Establish Intention

Intention is the mental and emotional blueprint we set up to establish the quality of connection and create a clear impression of what is it we would like to see manifest in the physical. It occurs on the macro and micro level.

As soon as we engage our horses, we’re influencing every moment. Establishing how it is we wish to be as riders and horsepeople prior to setting eyes on our horse and what qualities we wish to cultivate between us is part of our generalized setting of intention.

Who is it that I need to be today? What does that require of me?

Instead of waiting for outside or external experience to inform how we feel or operate, intention calls us to step into the cultivation of behaviors and ways of working with our horses as an active practice. We don’t wait to feel calm. We practice calm. We don’t wait to feel confident. We practice confidence. Intention as the expression of our creative force.

On a more micro level, intention allows us to create an experience of the ideal in our mind’s eye that creates fertile ground for its physical manifestation. For instance, if I am wanting to ask for a transition from walk to trot, I create a sensory blueprint for how I want that to look.

I see my horse effortlessly and softly move into the transition with engagement.

I feel the connection between us and the relaxed way of being we both share.

I hear his footfalls on the ground, even and regular.

I create the ideal vision of what it is that I want in my mind’s eye then wait for the physical to catch up.

When we move from this place, our body reponds in ways that are barely perceptible to us- but not to our horses. When we create a visual template in our minds, our body responds by firing off the neural pathways and muscle triggers that support the physical creation of what we’ve imagined. This is one of the key reasons visualization is so successful in improving physical performance even in situations where the only practice that’s been engaged is an imagined one.

Intention also translates to a purposeful plan, a course of action that clearly and deliberately outlines the way forward. It begins with cultivating a mental landscape that sees what you want come to life, but also outlines the progression of steps necessary to achieving that end.

The application of the aid and the quality of the connection you establish with you horse begins always with your intention.

Step 2: Adjust Energy

Once you have established your intention, the second stage is to purposely direct your energy to support it. Being able to manage your energy also comes with an understanding of your energetic boundaries and those of your horse, your ability to ground yourself and to effectively manage your breath.

There’s a lot of confusion around what it means to “make your energy bigger” or “make your energy smaller” and I believe this is partly because we are only used to recognizing ourselves in purely physical terms. Our boundary, however, extends beyond the actual dimensions of our body. The clearest way to understand this is to think of it as personal space. If someone unwanted or unfamiliar comes close, you are acutely aware of the point where they have breached your personal boundary. This boundary is different depending on who you are engaged with and the level of intimacy between you. The same is true for our horses.

In order to make it more tangible, think of your boundary as extending an arm’s length out from your body- to the side, above and below. Most of us aren’t practiced at taking up all the space owed to us. In addition we have a poorly developed awareness of how our boundary represents our first point of influence and how it’s possible to influence the boundary of our horses without being in physical contact with them.

When it comes to the application of the aids, our boundaries vary depending on whether we are working on the ground or in the saddle. On the ground, cultivating a clear intention and  developing an awareness of the energetic boundary of you and your horse allows you to fine tune what it is you’re asking and seek the earliest point of influence before you come into physical contact.

Adjusting your energy on the ground also corresponds to purposefully directing your gaze in alignment with your intention; utilizing the breath to support transitions, both emotional and physical; and subtle adjustments in posture as the pre-cursor to applying a more direct physical cue.

In the saddle, the level of intimacy is already established by the physical connection of spine meeting spine; as a consequence, your energetic influence can be much more refined.

Again, a coordination of gaze, posture and breath all blend together to create momentum behind the intention that you have established.

Step 3: Organise the physical

The next stage is the application of a physical aid. In any situation, before insisting on follow through, you have to ensure that what you are asking is understood and that you are clear and consistent. The effectiveness of the aid is directly proportional to the timing of the release. In order to communicate that the answer given by your horse is the one that you’re looking for, the release of the aid needs to correspond with the “correct” response.

If you experience confusion, the first thing to check is clarity of application and understanding. It’s also vital you give your horse time to answer the question to avoid unfair increase in pressure and situations where what you are asking him to do is outside what he can mentally or emotionally assimilate at the time.

Step 4: Thanksgiving

In each and every situation, you horse is fully deserving of your thanks. The fact that they permit us to ride and to work with them in the way we do is an everyday miracle that we often take for granted. Gratitude and thanks are the closing chapter of creating intention that focuses on partnership and connection, is part of the closing ritual of the time that you have spent together and the end point of any successful application of an aid.

xx Jane

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Want head and heart skills for a trusting, happy partnership?

You can have a riding life filled with clarity, purpose and confidence- and this program will help you have it. JoyRide is an online membership program for big-hearted riders looking to create a meaningful relationship with their horse. Get in charge of your thoughts, master your mindset and your emotions so you can get out there and do what you love together. Click here to find out more!

Mindset, Connection & Horse Welfare with Equine Connection

I had the total pleasure of talking with Karsyn and Carolyn from Equine Connection for their horse welfare series.

What does it mean to have a partnership with your horse?

What is mindset and emotional agility?

How does the welfare of the horse play into your training?

We answer all that and more in the video below!

xx Jane

Want head and heart skills for a trusting, happy partnership?

You can have a riding life filled with clarity, purpose and confidence- and this program will help you have it. JoyRide is an online membership program for big-hearted riders looking to create a meaningful relationship with their horse. Get in charge of your thoughts, master your mindset and your emotions so you can get out there and do what you love together. Click here to join JoyRide, the Confident Rider Membership Program!

Transformational Horsemanship Facebook Live Series

The concept of transformational vs transactional horsemanship has really spoken to me over the past 12 months, and I have realised the former is where my passion lies- personally, professionally and in practice.

Our work and partnership with our horses can be transformational, but it is not inherently so; without paying attention to the process, it’s easy for it to become transactional.

Transactional horsemanship is where we ride in order to achieve a specific goal that is centred around producing a result.

Transformational horsemanship is where we are dedicated to the process of becoming; it’s a practice of personal evolution in relationship with our horse. Transformational horsemanship values who we are, how we behave and how we treat others, our horses and ourselves above the achievement of a specific result or outcome.

 

Transformational horsemanship does not exclude achievement; in fact, it holds us to a much higher standard of daily practice that ensures that what we are involving ourselves in is sustainable and enduring. It’s the process and practice of the artistry of riding and horsemanship as opposed to a series of sprints towards short term results.

The following is a series of Facebook Live Session recordings I held on Confident Rider dedicated to the discussion around transformational horsemanship and how the four quadrants- the intellectual, the physical, the emotional and the intuitive- all feed in to the mastery of whole hearted horsemanship.

There are ten sessions (some longer than others!) so you might want to grab the popcorn and get settled!

Enjoy!

xx Jane

Want head and heart skills for a trusting, happy partnership?

You can have a riding life filled with clarity, purpose and confidence- and this program will help you have it. JoyRide is an online membership program for big-hearted riders looking to create a meaningful relationship with their horse. Get in charge of your thoughts, master your mindset and your emotions so you can get out there and do what you love together. Click here to find out more!

Thought, Feeling and Intention ~ On Emotional Alignment & Congruence

The practice of emotional agility means that we need to become adept at emotional transitions, the crossover where one mood state is allowed to pass through and another allowed to rise up in its place. In order for us to effectively navigate these hinge points, we need skills of emotional recognition and understanding (the ability to recognize the messages behind emotions and deal with them accordingly) followed by the means to channel and process the energy created so that we can move forward in a way that is constructive and beneficial for both ourselves and our horses.

For most of us, this is a tall order. Generally speaking, we are taught to value intellectual and logical thought over everything else. As a consequence, many of us overlook or ignore gut feelings and deem our emotions untrustworthy, cultivating a façade that is opposes the emotional currents that run beneath the surface.

So how does this work against us when it comes to developing a relationship with your horse? Your horse’s ability to sense emotional congruence, to tell whether your feelings, action and intentions are in alignment is one of their greatest skills. It’s not a party trick but an essentials skill for survival; understanding subtle changes in body language, breath and heart rate and even hormone levels is part of their extra-sensory defence system that alerts them to possible danger and keeps them safe.

Transfer this to a domestic situation, and a lack of congruence between how you feel and what you emanate and project makes you untrustworthy. Misalignment does not foster feelings of safety and instead creates an atmosphere of defensiveness and concern.

Consequently, the onus of responsibility lies with us, firstly, in ensuring that we are not using our horses or training as an outlet to release built up emotional residue, and secondly, to do the internal work needed for thought, feeling, action and intention to line up.

Allowing for an emotional transition at the start of every session is a valuable practice to get into. Checking in, doing what is needed to ground and anchor yourself and establish your intention allows for a conscious start point.

Replacing judgement with curiosity. What is it that my horse is presenting me with today? How is it that I am feeling? What is the most constructive way forward?

Observing and seeking to understand our responses to what our horse presents is one of the greatest gifts of healing and self-development they provide us with. Our task is to listen and reflect perhaps in greater quantities than we ask and direct.

xx Jane

The new Aware Pathway in JoyRide is all about learning to recognise and process your emotions. The last thing we want is a situation where we’re suppressing how we feel or letting our feelings run riot.  That’s no good for anyone, least of all you and your horse. Acknowledging how you feel, grounding yourself, setting boundaries, processing emotions and managing your energy are what it means to be emotionally agile. You’ll learn how to do that as part of my JoyRide Membership Program. You can check it out here.

Taking Your Emotions With You; The Case for Wholehearted Judgement

“Leave your emotions at the gate”. It’s a principle that I subscribed to for a long time and only recently have I fully processed my thoughts and feelings about it. Consequently, I’ve completely flipped around.

What do I think now? I think that leaving our emotions at the gate is not the answer to being measured and effective horsepeople, but actually a huge part of the reason why we have problems intelligently managing our emotions in the first place- and will only continue to do so for as long as suppression and detachment about how we really feel about an event, situation or circumstance appears to be the answer.

When we consider who we are and how it is we operate in the world, we function as a consequence of multiple intelligences; the physical, the mental and intellectual, the emotional and the intuitive. For the most part, the most highly developed of these and consequently, the most overused is our logical or intellectual intelligence. This is not because it is any better or stronger than the others, it’s simply the one that we have paid the most attention to. Analyse any school system or educational institution and it becomes apparent that feelings and sensory intelligence are not promoted, if barely acknowledged.

As a consequence, we have ceased to understand the importance and value of experiencing the entire range of emotions on the spectrum- from those that we might categorise as “negative” right through to the “positive” emotions- simply because our underdeveloped use of emotional, intuitive and in some cases physical intelligence have lost the ability to communicate to each other and process information as the highly developed and exquisite sensory and mental superhighway they are.

The effects of this are far reaching. Our heavy reliance on thought and logic means that we are “stuck” in overthinking loops that appear to have no way out. Having ignored our physical intelligence, our body is unable to translate this mental energy into useful, tangible action.

Cut off from our emotions, we are unable to process how we feel in response to the thoughts we are having and allow our emotions to flow. Instead, we repress or express in ways that damage us, our horses and those around us.

A little attended to intuition is no longer free to provide insight or to allow the space and “allowing” needed to reach conclusions, understandings and learnings that are the gift of our intrinsic, wholehearted nature.

Instead, we cut ourselves off at the head- literally- and wonder why there is no way out.

Judgement- or our perception of judgement- is one such example of this. In the healthiest sense, judgement allows us to look at something and decide whether it works for us or not. When we are able to integrate all of the above, judgement is not name calling or put downs; it doesn’t categorise things into good or bad or us and them. Judgement is healthy and necessary.

I’ve chosen judgment as my topic of choice in the previous two blogs I have written about. Off the back of that, I’ve noticed the questions and dialogue I’ve received around it interprets judgement- all judgement- as unhealthy, which is so if you are not operating from a psyche that is measured, that pays attention to all of its intelligences and honours each of them.

Judgement based purely on intellect will most likely result in categorization and polarization.

Judgement based purely on emotion means we lose the ability to rationalize, to take what we need to from them and to channel them appropriately. Instead, we might overreact or fly off the handle.

The healthy form of judgement involves us making intelligent, considered decisions as a result of heart and mind working together. It’s vastly different from labelling, name calling and personal attacks, which is much more reflective individual disharmony and division,  such unprocessed feeling or trauma, rather than an inherent “flaw” of judgement.

Categorizing emotion- any emotion- as good or bad, or as something we should or shouldn’t do is unhelpful, and what’s more, damaging.

The practice instead needs to turn to the promotion of each of our intelligences so we can understand the messages and learnings provided to us and learn to channel and direct them in ways that see us operating from the whole of ourselves for the sake of everyone- us, our horses and those around us.

Leaving our emotions at the gate cuts us off from the ability to create meaningful, empathetic and fully engaged relationships with our horses, and I think we owe ourselves and them so much more than that.

xx Jane

Self-Responsibility; Taking Charge of What’s In Your Cup

We’d just finished eating dinner and were sitting around the table.

Sometimes they come over to me in the playground and they say that I’m stupid, he said to me quietly. He was fiddling with his hands and looking quite upset.

That’s hard, I tell him. When people behave like that it can be hard to deal with, you’re allowed to be upset. It doesn’t mean it’s true though. And it doesn’t mean that you have to be like them, I continue. You can just walk away.

Think of it this way. I pull three of the empty glasses towards me that are sitting on the table.

If this glass is full of milk, and you knock it so that some spills over the side, what comes out? I ask him.

Milk, he says.

Right.

And if this one is full of water and I knock it over, what comes out?

Water, he says. Right, I say.

And if this one if full of Orange Juice and I bump it, what comes out?

Orange juice.

Right. So what spills over is only ever what’s on the inside. You can’t knock the glass with water in it and have milk come out. Just like, you can’t accidentally spill the glass with orange juice and have milk come out.

People are the same. What they do and what they say is not so much about you as it is what they are feeling, or “full of” on the inside. If they say those things to you, you can remind yourself that what’s coming out is what is in their cup. You get to decide what your cup is going to be full of.

***

I’d had the idea to write a blog on self-responsibility for a few days now, but every time I sat down to write it, it wasn’t coming together. It was dull, uninteresting, righteous. It felt like a lecture in how to behave given from the podium, rather than an exploration of what truly self-responsibility is; a liberation.

When it comes to my coaching work, my own work with my horses and the way that try to navigate the world, I always try to assess what my part is in what I am experiencing. Self-responsibility is always the start point.

The sooner that you let go of the excuses; the sooner you stop blaming other people, horses or things for your experiences; the sooner you embrace the fact that your power to affect change and to create what you want as opposed to just experience what may appear to be a sequence of random events and circumstances we call life…

 …the sooner you step into the driving seat and begin to exert influence over the only thing in life that you can truly control; your attitude, your responses and the choices you make.

In other words, you get to choose what’s in your cup.

When I began to apply this thought process to my life and riding, things took on a whole new meaning.

Deciding what’s in your cup means that you anchor yourself in your intention. It means looking to yourself in each and every moment to decide how you want to proceed. It doesn’t mean that everything will always go to plan, but it does mean that you are involved in a dynamic process of introspection that allows you- or at least calls you- to stay in alignment with your values and your aspirations.

What could be more liberating than that.

“My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing your best in this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment” ~ Oprah Winfrey

xx Jane

Your Emotional Bank Account

Imagine that every morning when you wake up, ten credits are deposited in your emotional bank account. A withdrawal is made every time you do something which costs you energy; anytime that you are required to draw on your inner resources or need to step up in some shape or form.

It’s possible to gain credits also. Credits come from anything that “fills you up”, supports you, from positive experience, and from joy.

Deductions and deposits are made physically also. If you don’t get enough sleep; if you don’t eat well, or at all; if you don’t drink enough. All of these things cause you to withdraw on the balance that you have. All of these things “tax” you in some way, and vice versa.

Imagine now the following. Last night’s sleep was rough. Getting up is an effort. You manage to haul yourself out of bed and get yourself to work. Minus 3 points.

Work is busy. Minus 1. You barely have time for lunch so you just grab something quick on the run. Minus 1. Your boss is in a bad mood; there are deadlines to meet and there’s still so much work today. Everyone in the office is feeling it. Minus 2.

5 o clock finally comes and you can’t wait to go and see your horse. Things have been going really well lately and you feel like you both are starting to get it together. You get ready and lead him out to the arena for a ride.

You can feel he’s a little tense when you get on but he settles and you start to walk around. For some reason today, the “easy” stuff is feeling really hard. It’s not that your horse is doing anything “wrong” but you’re all over the place; you’re not enjoying it at all.

At the end of the ride, you will completely deflated. Maybe you were kidding yourself with this whole riding thing. It felt like it had been going so well but right now, you feel like the best option might be to throw the towel in and face up to the reality that you just don’t have what it takes.

Of the 10 points you had to draw on at the start of the day, 7 have been used up before you even got to the barn. If you are in a situation where you need a certain amount of emotional stealth to produce a successful result, you may find yourself in a position where you simply don’t have enough to draw on. You were feeling compromised before you even made it out of the start gates.

While the exact details of the story above may not hit home for you, we’ve all had experiences where our emotional bank accounts are running dry. Understanding that certain events in our day or even life circumstances at the time have an effect on our resilience, our coping skills and how positive we feel in any given moment is an important consider when it comes to our riding, and what’s more we can use the information to set ourselves up for success.

Using the metaphor of the emotional bank account gives you a tangible means to assess what might currently be taxing you and how you can make some deposits. There are many things in life that happen outside of our control, but there is also much that we can do to set ourselves up for success.

Here’s some things to consider when it comes to making some deposits:

  • Sleep! If you’ve ever not had enough of it you will know how not getting enough sleep affects your mood and outlook. If you are lacking confidence or about to do something that you know is going to “require” more of you, do your best not to be burning the midnight oil and getting the most rest that you can
  • Set yourself up for success. It seems like an obvious one but asking yourself, what can I do to set myself up for success in this situation? Goes a long way in illuminating some basic measures you can take that will allow you to feel more supported and resourceful. What can you do to better set yourself up for success?
  • Cut yourself some slack. If you are going through something that is taking multiple deposits from your emotional bank account, cut yourself some slack. Now may not be the time to really push the bar when it comes to your comfort zone, or put you and your horse in a position where you need to be at the top of your game. Recognise what you need and honour it. At the end of the day, it’s better for you AND better for your horse.
  • Nourish yourself. If you aren’t eating or drinking enough or filling yourself up with things that don’t support you physically, it will be having an effect on your emotional resilience and health also. Check in and make sure you are getting what you physically need to feel emotionally resourceful also.

You can’t pour from an empty cup. Look after yourself first.

xx Jane

Practicing The Art Of Acceptance

“I did a really intensive practice of non-judgement for a whole month,” she said. “It was really hard, but at the end of the month, I felt amazing. It was like all of the energy that I spent sending out judging things was coming back to me in a positive way instead”.

Being judgmental- or perhaps more to the point not being judgmental- is a really interesting topic. I’ve been throwing it around in my brainspace after having this conversation with my lovely friend Donna recently, and got to thinking, what’s the opposing positive manifestation of that? What’s the flip side of judgement? Because just “non-judgement”  as a definition wasn’t really cutting it for me.

The conclusion that I came to was acceptance. The opposite of non-judgment was glorious, effortless acceptance of what is.

Acceptance worked for me on a number of levels. For instance, one of the arguments that came up in my head was, well, isn’t some form of judgement necessary? I mean we need to judge in order that we can evaluate things and make a decision about how to move forward, right?

Sound the buzzer!

Well, no. Because judgement isn’t synonymous with a productive outcome. It’s not linked together with objective evaluation. It’s a critique, and often on areas of life, riding and horses that may not concern us at all.

Judgement, it seems, is the mother ship of non- acceptance. Judgment causes us to observe something about ourselves, our horses, other people and situations and add layer of emotion on top which causes us to plant our flag in one of two camps:

Camp Right or Camp Wrong

Camp Good or Camp Bad

And if we wanted to get more specific:

Camp I’m a worthy person or Camp I’m not a worthy person

Camp My Horse Is Good or Camp My Horse Is Bad

You can see where I’m going with this.

Acceptance, on the other hand… just the idea of it feels liberating.

Acceptance is the objective observation of what is, before we add the layer of emotion. Before we get all judge-ey judge-ey.

Accepting something doesn’t mean you necessarily condone it.

It doesn’t mean that you won’t do anything to change it.

But it does mean that you observe a situation and you… accept it. It’s not good or bad. It’s not right or wrong. It just… is.

I shared a post recently from my time with a group of ten year old children involved in an Equine Assisted Learning program. One of the beautiful things about horses, we told them, is that they are give you instant feedback that’s non-judgmental. In other words, if you horse expresses to you concern or anxiety, they do so with clear, non-emotional intent.

Often, in our human to human interactions, our instructions or feedback to each other is not so unemotional. In fact, at the bare minimum, there’s often an undercurrent of feeling that colours every interaction we have, for better or for worse.

At the end of our session together, we asked the kids to pick a word that summed up their experience. One of the little boys in my group choose honesty. He said that he liked that the horses were honest.

When I asked how that made him feel, I was really taken aback by his answer. He said that it made him feel safe.

Judgment, it seems, is the elixir that causes us give away our energy in subjective, emotionally-fueled evaluation that somehow allows us to feel “more right”. More right in our opinion of others; more right in our assessment of our horses; more right in criticizing ourselves about how we should be if we weren’t this, that or the other.

Acceptance liberates the energy that we would spend in asserting our self-asserted right-ness and allows us to channel it productively.

If there’s a situation we can’t change, judging it is a waste of energy.

Accepting allows us to keep moving.

If our horse shows concern or upset, judging makes us feel worse about the situation without moving us closer to the solution.

Acceptance gifts us with emotional distance, that allows us to invest in the solution, rather than the problem.

If there is something about ourselves that we wish were different, judging only causes us to fester and ruminate. In unchangeable situations, it will make us feel worse with no benefit. In changeable situations, it will prevent us from making it different.

Once I decided to invest some energy in actively cultivating acceptance, I felt my body and mind take a long exhale.

“Peace is the result of training your mind to process life as it is rather than as you think it should be” ~ Wayne Dyer

Exhale.

xx Jane

What’s The One Thing?

Reflections from WEG

I’m in the hotel room, kicking back. It’s the night before the “big day”. The competition is due to start in the morning and we’ve opted out of attending the open ceremony festivities in favour of some down time and internal silence (it’s amazing how the white noise at big events surrounds you at all times!).

Since WEG has been over, I’ve seen many questions asked, a large proportion of which included the statement, what’s the one thing?

What’s the one thing that made the difference?

What’s the one thing that turned it around?

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The truth is, there’s never really one thing.

In the case of success of any sort, it’s always multiple things that contribute to producing a successful result. One of my favorite (and potentially most frustrating!) lines is, “it’s all about the process”.

It’s a favourite because it’s true- it really is all about the process.

It’s frustrating because it’s generally not what you want to hear when you are looking for, well… the one thing.

Process indicates time.

Process indicates practice.

Process indicates consistent application.

Process, process, process.

And despite knowing that, despite knowing it was all about the process and the years and months of work that had gone in, I was still searching for something.

I don’t believe in the “one thing” but I do know there are times when I’ve heard the right thing at the time when it mattered most, and it was that thing that I was searching for.

And so there I was, lying on my bed, searching my brain space for the right thing to say.

I was asking myself, what is the one thing that I would want to hear if it were me in the saddle tomorrow? What would I want to tell myself? What would I want to hear?

What IS the one thing?

And you know what it is?

It’s gratitude.

That’s what I’d want to be reminded of.

I sent this message to Robyn:

If you can ride into the warm up and enter the arena with a sense of gratitude- gratitude for what you have already achieved, for your amazing horses, for the experience and the chance to be country representatives, I truly think you connect to the higher part of yourself that transcends any other lower energies that make you feel separate or concerned. If you can ride for and with that part of you, then you will dance your way through it.

You don’t have to be riding at the World Equestrian Games or aspire to in order to experience the positive effects of gratitude. Cultivating an attitude and energy of gratitude is a panacea for any number of ills; among its most potent superpower being its ability to ground you in the present, redirect your focus to what is working and what is going well right now and as a consequence leave you in a space where you are much more resourceful and able to embrace opportunities and negotiate challenges.

Stepping into a grateful mindset is always a choice. And one that without fail yields positive results.

So if there was a one thing that I could narrow down, that would be it.

Process, process, process.

And:

Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.

xx Jane

Some Tips For Dealing With Anxiety

Anxiety is something that can be simultaneously complex and simplistic to deal with; it also ranks #1 on the list of topics that I hear most about from riders. Incidentally, it’s one of my favourite subjects to address simply because there is so much you can do to retrain an “anxious mind”. I see it all the time with riders that I work with and I apply the same techniques myself if I notice my mind going in an unhelpful direction!

In this video, I answer a question from Rachel via my Confident Rider facebook page who asked for some tips on dealing with anxiety in the “getting ready to ride” stages… it’s really only the tip of the iceberg as to what’s available in terms of techniques and plans.

And if you want to delve in, upskill, retrain YOUR anxious mind and have me support you all the way, then check out JoyRide. This is one of the many topics we address and I am constantly blown away by the ninja skills of the riders in the program turning things around for themselves. Click here to check out JoyRide!

Feel free to post your comments and questions, I’m more than happy to answer them.

xx Jane

Tension: The Sum total of many missed opportunities for relaxation

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In horses and humans, it seems to be the same; when it comes to tension, the methods and strategies you choose to use are either adding to it or relieving it. It’s both a cumulative build and a cumulative release, the magic lying in your ability to notice the microelements that contribute to the build up on tension, or conversely to the creation of relaxation.

From my own work with my horses and with myself, I now see tension as the sum total of many missed opportunities for relaxation, the consequence of our tendency to observe things broadly, generally, as whole chunks as opposed to a progressive sequence of small bites or moments.

For example, we may see the tension, but what we missed was the loss of focus, the disregard our horses had for us when mounting, the tendency to suck back towards the gate.

We may see the tension, but what we missed was the lack of understanding of the basics back at walk, and now at trot and canter, we really have a problem.

 

In ourselves, we may feel the tension, but we weren’t mindful of our constant rumination on what might go wrong over the course or days and weeks prior.

We might feel the tension, but we never thought to change it or to actively pursue the skills we need to develop to experience relaxation.

We see, feel or experience the end result having missed a series of opportunities to redirect the focus of both ourselves and our horses; to ensure our communication is clear and understood; to find solutions to anxieties.

In both horses and humans, the opportunity to address tension and introduce relaxation occurs in the first instance that thought and focus becomes misdirected. You may be a long way from the arena or trails when your mind begins to ruminate on the concerns and anxieties that you have in the saddle. Now is your opportunity.

Or maybe you find yourself watching a YouTube clip of someone in competition and feel your stomach go tight at the thought of you being out there doing the same. Now is your opportunity.

Or maybe the suggestion of doing something that challenges you is enough to increase your heart rate and make you feel uneasy. Now is your opportunity.

All of the above are not feelings to be denied, avoided or ignored. They are notifications from your emotional messenger system telling you that there’s something that you need to address and pay attention to. And each and every one of these gentle jolts from your subconscious is an opportunity for you to introduce relaxation, to empty out the tension.

The tiny bites that add up to the big experiences.

xx Jane

Mindfulness, Focus & Relaxation- A Conversation with Warwick Schiller

Want to learn more about Warwick, the work he does or his (truly) awesome subscription program? Of course you do- what a crazy question.

Click here or below to be taken to where you need to be!

Looking to be a part of an empowering community of riders who have your back? Ready to bust through those confidence and anxiety issues once and for all?

You better click here. Let’s get that sorted.

Confident Rider Training Series LIVE

I’ve been running my free Confident Rider training series for close to 12 months now, so it seemed like the perfect time to jump in an explore the topics covered in a little more detail. You can catch all of the recordings from the past week below, I hope you enjoy them!

What’s more, my membership program JoyRide is currently open to new members. It will be your last opportunity to join me for a good few months. You can find out all the details and subscribe for the JoyRide by clicking here.

Day One: Focus and Vision

Day Two: Beliefs and Identity

Day Three: Physiology

Day Four: Breath

Day Five: Strategy

Dropping the “Just” ~ Letting Go Of The Need To Compare

I’ve spent most of my life living as an over-apologizer. I’m sure that some of you out there will relate. Chances are that if you step on my foot, accidently whack me with your bag or ram me with your trolley in the supermarket, I will immediately and sincerely apologize. Actually not apologizing requires a considerable amount of effort on my part (I imagine that to be similar in effort to swallowing ones own tongue) so honed is my internal apologizing system.

The second thing I profess to is that I am an over-volunteerer. That’s right. If I am watching a presentation or listening to you give a talk, you can rest assured that if you ask for a volunteer,

I will offer myself forward for the job. There’s only so much silence to a request I can handle before I feel my arm lifting of its on accord, and next thing I find myself front and centre stage.

My over-volunteering tendencies (maybe let’s say instead I am a “participator”?) have led me to some interesting experiences. I have been a part of a magic show and then the “pretend” support person while someone was going through “labour” to demonstrate how to be helpful to a real person in such a situation (sidenote: I don’t recommend this.).

In the latter example I felt that the other person was a bit too “into it” for my liking, but that’s a whole other story. I still have Giles’ words “well, you did volunteer to go up there” ringing in my ears as I voiced my concerns that her unwillingness to step out of the role at what I saw to be an appropriate time was somewhat disturbing.

But you know the other thing that I used to do? I used to use the word “just” like some sort of linguistic confetti. Just is one of those seemingly harmless but altogether insidious four letter words that diminishes everything that comes before and follows after it. In my work now as a coach, I am keenly aware of the power of language. The words we use to describe ourselves, our challenges, situation and achievement are a litmus test of how ultimately we feel about ourselves in terms of our beliefs, the framework we are operating from (be that positive or negative) and the amount of resourcefulness we feel moving forward.

In a coaching capacity, many of the interactions I have in the first instance are in writing and I get to see solid examples of the words people use to communicate their current state of play and their celebrations. I also have a super awesome and active Facebook group connected to my membership program, JoyRide, and I am always on the lookout for that little word. Just.

It might go something like this…

I jumped this weekend! But it was just 80cm.

I got out there and competed for the first time, but it was just in the novice classes.

I rode my horse but we just trotted.

Just, just, just.

The use of just is used to diminish an achievement by way of comparing you to “something else”. In most cases, that “something else” is not quite clear, but it brings to light an internal ranking system that prevents us from fully celebrating our achievements.

It’s like saying, I did this and it was huge for me but I know other people are out there doing way bigger, badder and better things so it’s really no big deal.

But you know what? It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to you. And when it comes to celebrating personal milestones or daily marks of progress, those big deals are about as big as they come. Playing them down means you are ripping yourself off from the full magnificence and joy that basking in an achievement can offer, and to my mind, that seems like something we should do our best to avoid.

What other people are doing and achieving is completely irrelevant to your own achievements. Adding a “just” clause to your celebrations is the ultimate self-inflicted backhanded compliment. It adds no value whatsoever and serves no positive purpose.

So the next time you share something good that happened, or celebrate an achievement refrain from adding any just clauses or qualifying statements. You don’t have to justify, reduce or downplay it. Instead, enjoy it, own it and let others do the same.

xx Jane

The Confidence Factor ~ Working With The Fear; Making a plan of action for dealing with fear in the saddle {Part 3}

Recording of Facebook Live Session

Fear. It has a lot to answer for in the horse world. Its presence has derailed many a horsey dream and can manifest in a variety of ways. For some, the effects can be more subtle. A lingering lack of motivation for one. Or it might be that you find yourself putting off what you know you actually want to do in favour of the playing it safe, and consequently, you find yourself getting on and doing the same thing day in and day out.

For others though, the effects of fear are much more overt and obvious. In these cases, the feelings can range from an ongoing sense of dread to feelings of overwhelming panic and helplessness.

The truth of the matter is that regardless of your experience level and discipline, most of us have experienced fear to some degree at some time or another in our riding. And although the experience of fear is not one that we want to encourage, the key to moving through fear and past it is not to think that we have to eradicate fear altogether but rather take the information that it is offering us and utilize it to our best advantage.

If you are currently in a situation where you are experiencing a riding challenge or finding that you have lost your mojo as a result of accident, injury or upset, take heart. Fear is a very normal and not altogether unwanted emotion. That said, the presence or experience of fear need not hold us back from getting out there and doing what it is that we want to do with our horses. What we need is a solid plan of action that sees us incrementally expanding the outer reaches of our comfort zone in a manner that is attainable and progressive, and that can only happen when we have a clear plan of action for how we are going to move forward. Just wishing it away is not going to get us very far.

Let’s look at some key elements you need to consider when creating a strategy for dealing with fear in your riding.

Get specific

The first thing that I want to know when I am working with riders who have fear based concerns is what specifically is it that they are afraid of or concerned about. Gaining clarity around what specifically you are feeling fear around is really important in figuring out how to move forward.

Sweeping generalisations and blanket statements often lead to feelings of overwhelm, and magnifies the challenge to the point where it can seem insurmountable. Instead, move out of “big picture” territory and focus on the details by asking yourself, what is it specifically that I am afraid of?

Is the fear warranted?

Now we are dealing with specifics, the next thing I want to ascertain is whether the fear warranted. Just like any other emotion, fear is an important emotional messenger and one that we definitely don’t want to ignore.

If you are experiencing a behavioral issue with your horse or are in a situation where you feel that the safety of one or both of you is compromised then I consider the fear to be both valid and necessary. In this instance, it is not a case of “manning up” and riding through it but of understanding the underlying reasons and motivations for the behavior that you are dealing with and arming yourself with the intelligent means to safely and empathetically deal with the situation.

Some key questions to consider here are:

Do I feel safe in the current situation that I am finding myself in?

Do I feel like I have the necessary skills to deal with what I am being presented with, or to see this challenge through to a successful conclusion for both my horse and myself?

If the answer to any of those is no, then this important information that will feed into our strategy moving forward.

When in doubt, put the safety of yourself and your horse above all else.

Break it down

The next step is to grab a piece of paper and divide it into two columns. The first column is going to be for your horse and the second column is for you, the rider. As we are in a partnership with a powerful, conscious creature with his own feelings and motivations, it’s important that our strategy includes not only the elements of how to successfully manage ourselves, but the emotional and physical needs of our horses also.

In light of the current challenge that you are facing, I would like you to consider the emotional health and capacity of your horse. Do you feel as though your horse has the emotional capacity to deal with what it is that is being asked of him? Or is his level of anxiety and apprehension in relation to your chosen task a contributing factor to your own fears and uneasiness?

The same needs to be considered on a physical level. Am I asking my horse to do something that is outside of his current range of capability or skill base? Do I need to consider his comfort in terms of tack fitting or nutritional health? Am I being clear and consistent in my direction to him and fair in my expectations?

Your answers in either direction will allow you to plan your next move. If your horse is showing anxiety and concern in response to your requests, or has yet to develop the physical competency to comply happily and successfully, then this is something that needs to be considered and factored in to your training together.

If you are unsure how to cope with what you are being presented with yourself, reach out for help. Cultivate a feeling of internal resourcefulness that allows you to feel that even if you currently don’t have the answers, you will continue to educate yourself and seek assistance from those who do.

Skillset or Mindset?

 Now to consider ourselves exclusively as riders in the context of the situation.

Confidence, which is a mindset, and competence, which is a skillset, are often lumped together in the same pile, but they are actually two very separate entities. Whilst confidence is a state and something that we can train ourselves to activate at will, competence is related to a lack of knowing, and is usually time dependent. For instance, if I am looking to master a certain skill, then I will need to ensure I actually perform that skill on a regular basis before I become competent at it. My body needs time to develop the motor skills and the neural pathways necessary in order for me to be able to achieve that as a fluid and familiar action.

When it comes to analysing ourselves, we want to isolate these two parts and ask ourselves:

Do I feel like I can efficiency and effectively deal with what I am currently being faced with in the saddle or is it “all in my head”?

The first part of the question speaks directly to our skillset and competence, and the second to our mindset or confidence.

It may be the case that you believe you have the skills and yet your internal feeling is that you are unable to cope. In this case, we need to focus explicitly on the mental skills required in order for you to be able to successful manage your mindset so that you can comfortably and successfully deal with what you are being presented with.

As a side note, what I hear regularly from riders is the belief that a feeling of confidence will be synonymous with the feeling that they can deal with anything that comes their way and will ultimately have all the answers. Instead, think of confidence as an internal resourcefulness; confidence will give you the fortitude so that even if you don’t know exactly how to manage the situation that you find yourself in, you are able to search for solutions that allow you to keep moving progressively forward, combined with the belief that what you desire is possible for you.

Making Your Plan

At this stage, what you have are four very distinct areas that you can use to inform your strategy. They are:

  1. The emotional health and wellbeing of your horse
  2. The physical health and wellbeing of your horse
  3. Your skillset and competency level as a rider
  4. Your confidence level and “feelings” around your ability to cope with the situation.

Now that you have a clear idea of your strengths and the areas that you need to focus on, you can start to make a plan. Take things step by step and break it down so you have clear steps and action points to follow through on.

Despite the breadth and depth of feeling that fear creates, refuse to use it as your excuse to keep returning back to the last place you felt like things were in your control. Instead, accept its presence, define your strategy and commit to inching your way in the direction you desire; after all, the only way to get fear to step aside is to move towards it.

xx Jane

The Confidence Factor ~ Managing Your Emotional State (Part 2)

Recording of Facebook Live Session

Sarah sat down in front of me, slumped over in her chair. It didn’t take an expert to see that she was feeling pretty down about herself. It’s no good, she told me. I just can’t get it together. My horse tries his heart out for me but I freeze up and let him down. I know that I am the weakest link between the two of us, but I just can’t seem to make it happen.

Talk me through it, I told her. Tell me how to feel as unconfident as you. So Sarah led me on the journey inside her mind. It’s at its worst when I am riding away from home, she said.

I start to think about who might be watching and what they are going to think of me. I worry that I am going to make a fool of myself, and that my horse might do something that I can’t manage, even though that’s never happened before. I don’t even know where it comes from, but it sucks the joy out of everything. I just can’t seem to get on top of it.

The situation that Sarah described is not an uncommon one. The details or triggers might vary from person to person, but many riders can relate to the feeling of not being able to “keep it together” when they are riding. Add to that the guilt and frustration that comes with the realization that you are your own worst enemy and we have a pretty depressing cocktail on our hands. It’s no wonder that a lack of confidence and a loss of mojo or motivation often go hand in hand.

But here’s the thing- despite how you may presently feel, or how you have felt in the past, the ability to feel confident is very much an inside job. And the big secret is this: Confidence is a skill. It’s an emotional- mental framework that arises from harnessing a few different elements that are available to all of us, the details of which I am going to share with you right now.

In the first part of this series, I discussed how getting a handle on the Three C’s is vital to you ability to cultivate confidence and work to an effective strategy moving forward. Let’s quickly revisit what those were.

They are:

  1. Clarity- the need to know specifically what it is you want to do and how you are going to get there
  2. Confidence- managing the mental-emotional framework that you are operating from
  3. Competence- understanding what skills you need to develop in order to be able to effectively physically manage yourself in the saddle

For the most part, competence and confidence are lumped together and seen as dependent entities, but they are actually separate pieces worthy of individual attention. Right now, we are going to look at how you can deliberately begin to work from confident mindset by understanding the underlying systems at play and how they work together.

Regardless of whether you perceive the emotion you are experiencing to be positive or negative, it arises as a result of three main factors coming into alignment. These are your focus, your self-talk and your ability to manage your physiology, or your breath and body, in a manner that supports a confident mindset.

Your ability to direct your focus towards what it is that you want and to place situation and events in an empowering context is your super power. If you are currently experiencing lack of confidence, nerves or anxiety in relation to your riding, chances are your focus is future based and your attention is based on what it is that you are looking to avoid as opposed to what it is that you want.

This focus results in a domino affect that dominates our self talk and what we view to be possible for ourselves, which in turn impacts us in a very tangible way. Not only is kryptonite for confidence, but it also signals our bodies to prepare for impending doom, triggering a release of stress hormones into our system as we quite literally prepare for physical escape from an imagined scenario. Not exactly ideal for the type of Zen want to create in the saddle!

If there is one thing that you can do to significantly impact your level of confidence it is to learn to control your focus, and by control I mean to develop the habit of turning your attention towards what it is that you want as opposed to what it is that you are trying to avoid. Here are some simple examples of what I mean:

“I don’t want to feel anxious and nervous” is a negatively geared focal point. Instead, what you are actually wanting is to feel calm and relaxed.

“I want to be able to keep it together and not freak out” can transform to “I want to be focused and on task”.

“I don’t want my horse to spook or get tense” becomes “I will focus on ensuring my horse is comfortable in his surroundings”.

Whilst they all may have the same end in mind, the associations and consequent mental imagery they invoke are radically different. Our minds are always moving towards something, so make sure what you are moving towards in your mind’s eye highlights your desired outcome and allows you to be proactive in the processes that you need to take that will maximize your chances of getting there.

The second key component in creating state is your self-talk. Our mind’s function like a computer, and in order for us to access the files that we need, we need to make sure that we are following the correct pathways. Our self-talk is the key to unlocking the files we need to get the best out of ourselves. Essentially, low quality self talk opens low quality files, and vice versa. You might have all the skills you need as a horseperson to effectively deal with what comes up, but if you aren’t operating from an positive or complementary mindset, you won’t be able to access them- at least not to the extent that is possible.

Analysing whether your self-talk is empowering or deflating will be a primary indicator of how resourceful and confident you feel in any given moment. If you are feeling anxious, chances are your inner dialogue will reflect this. I can’t do this, I am way out of my league, what if something happens, why do I even bother- sound familiar?

In order for us to feel confident, we need to manage our self-talk so it is supportive of our mission. Get curious. How do you talk to yourself when you feel confident? What would you inner dialogue be if you believed that you had what it took to make it happen? Do you have a mantra, statement or catchphrase that you could use to intercept any patterns of self- talk that are detracting from your mission and shift your focus in a different direction?

The third piece of the equation is much more tangible, and it’s for this very reason it’s often the best place to start when we are looking to change our state; our breath and the way that we are using and holding our bodies. If you are operating from an anxious or fearful framework, the effect will be instantly mirrored in our bodies. We adopt protective postures, hunching over. Our breath becomes shallow and fast, or we may find ourselves holding our breath for long periods of time. We hold tension all over, most obviously on our face and upper body.

Fortunately for us, our body and mind works as a two directional flow; whilst our thought processes may be immediately apparent in the way we hold and conduct ourselves, we can also consciously change our body and breath to affect the quality and nature of our thoughts.

With this in mind, think about what someone who is confident, focused and assured looks like in the saddle. How is their posture? Where is their gaze? How do you think your breath would be if you were confident and assured?

Now that we have this understanding, we can begin to use it as a formula of sorts to be proactive in directing our emotional state in the saddle. For example, in order for confident right now, what do you need to be focusing on? How can you manage your self-talk so that you feel positive and resourceful? And how can you adjust your body and breath to reflect confidence?

Such is their connectivity that choosing and focusing on one alone will create huge shifts in your mindset, and allow you to make positive changes towards the riding outcomes that you desire.

Being control of your state takes practice; your ability to control your focus and self-talk comes with consistently developing and inserting new patterns of behavior to replace those which are unwanted. Over time, the new pathways will become strengthened and it will become increasingly easier to consciously direct your state to match your intention.

xx Jane

The Confidence Factor- Clarity, Confidence & Competence (Part 1)

Recording of Facebook Live Pop up Clinic

It gets to us all at some time or another. The feeling that maybe you don’t quite have what it takes to make it happen. Perhaps you have just entered a competition, and all of the sudden a little voice pipes up saying, “What we’re you thinking! You’re completely out of your league!”

Or maybe you are struggling to get to the next phase of your riding but fear and anxiety make it feel like a physical impossibility.

It could even be that you are at the top of your game but a pesky seed of self doubt is holding you back from being the rider you know that you are capable of being.

Confidence- or more to the point, a lack of it- is a right kicker. When you’re in the midst of a confidence crisis, it can easily feel that everyone around you is busy qualifying for the Olympics while you are slumped across the mounting block at home begging the Confidence Fairy to come and tap you with her wand. The good news, however, is that confidence is a skill. It’s not something that you either have or you don’t. And it’s definitely not a case of waiting for the Confidence Fairy. Instead, it’s an emotion just like any other that exists as a result of us operating within a very specific framework- one that is both individually unique and easy to practically apply once you recognize the cooperative components and then seek to actively engage them.

When it comes to creating a strategy to cultivate confidence, more often than not, competence and confidence are grouped together, but they are actually two very separate parts worthy of individual attention. Whilst confidence is an emotional state and something that we are able to train ourselves to activate at will, competence relates to our skill level, and is consequently time dependent. For instance, if I am wanting to master a specific movement, or ride at a certain level in any discipline, then it follows that I will need to both learn and practice the necessary elements required for a period of time before I reach the required stage of competency and proficiency. On a physical level, there is a time period that exists in order for me to develop the motor skills and for the new neural pathways to form that allow me to execute that skill as a fluid and familiar action.

Whilst at first glance, it may seem that competency is required in order to feel confident, this is not actually the case. Being confident does not mean you have to know all the answers. It does not mean you always have to come out winning, or be able to do everything you feel you need to “right now”. And it certainly does not mean that you will never feel anxious, afraid or unsure.

Instead, confidence means that you maintain a level of internal resourcefulness that tells you that no matter what comes up, you will handle it. It means that you operate from a platform that sees you open to ongoing opportunity and learning. In essence, confidence allows you to back yourself; it allows you to remain open, centred and willing to take continual positive action in the direction that you desire.

In the very first instances when it comes to cultivating confidence, we need a road map, a plan; something that we can follow to take us from where it is that we are now to where we want to be. Formulating an effective strategy begins with identifying your “stuck points” and then working out how to deal with those specific elements. In order to do so, we need clarity; clarity not only on what is wanted, but also clarity on what is needed. Many riders that I work with ride around in a haze of ambiguity of what it is they actually want, and even more confusion exists as to how to actually get there if they do know what they want.

Addressing what I call “The 3 C’s”- clarity, competence and confidence- is vital when it comes to conditioning yourself for confidence and success. Let’s do a quick recap and break them down piece by piece:

A lack of clarity comes from not knowing what you want to do or specifically want or how you want to get there.

A lack of confidence arises when you are held back by doubts, concerns or worries, and feel unable to effectively manage your focus.

A lack of competency is lacking the skill base or not knowing how to do what you want to do.

With this in mind, if you are feeling stuck ask yourself:

What is the specific challenge that I am facing? Do I know what it is that I am trying to achieve?

Are the limitations that I am experiencing due to a lack of confidence? Do I feel as though I have the ability to follow through? Is my mindset the main issue here?

Do I have the skills and the know- how to make this happen? If not, what do I need to learn and whom can I get to help me?

I always say that the amount you are “thrown off” by any situation or circumstance is directly related to how steady you were prior. In essence, what we want to do is develop an effective and practical strategy that allows us to take ongoing action in the direction we desire, in conjunction with consistently applying the mental skills we need to create mental strength and resilience. Analysing the three C’s and understanding how they inform your consequent plan moving forward is vital.

Without clarity, we have no clear understanding of what it is we want to achieve.

Without competence, we will be unable to follow through on what is required.

And without confidence, you can have the skills and the talent, but it’s unlikely you will make the kinds of decisions you need to make, or take the kinds of actions you need to take to recognize and fulfill your full potential.

Truly being able to consistently operate from a confident mindset and commit yourself to constant positive action takes practice. Primarily, the skills we need to hone relates to our ability to effectively manage our emotional state and to frame each ride and challenge within an empowering context, which is what we are going to explore in Part Two of this series.

xx Jane

To Prove or Improve- Exploring the Fixed & Growth Mindset

At one point during the movie “Buck”, a documentary about the life of horseman Buck Brannaman, his foster mum, Betsy Shirley, turns to the interviewer in her amazing, sprawling accent and tells him, “He never showed any early signs of genius”. It made me laugh out loud at the time and it’s continued to ever since; in fact I repeated the same quote out loud to my husband only the other day as I watched my young horse attempt to navigate some trot poles for the first time in the arena. Definitely no early signs of genius apparent at that stage (don’t tell him I told you that, mmkay?).

As a culture, we love the idea of genius, of innate talent. We love to see it in others; sports stars, those who we consider to have a special “something something”. In science and the arts. Pretty much everywhere. A large chunk of our social narrative is built around our reverence of those with special gifts or abilities that separate them from the average person in the street. It’s fascinating to us.

Not only do we love a bit of genius in others but we especially love people to see it in us.

You’re a natural! That comes so easily to you! You’ve got a talent for that!

Who doesn’t love to hear that?

Although it can seem harmless enough, cultivating an identity from a place of innate ability rather than time invested in learning and mastery has its pitfalls. In fact, our willingness to embrace opportunity, to try new things and ultimately “put ourselves out there”, even at the risk of failure, all comes back to whether we whether we are in it to prove or in it to improve.

Fear of failure, worrying about what other people think, or being afraid of trying something new all comes under the “prove” mentality. When you are out to prove something, or fear that you could potentially be embarrassed or come unstuck by an inability to prove something, then you are operating from Carol Dweck describes as a fixed mindset.

A fixed mindset doesn’t allow for much wiggle room. The fixed mindset arises from the belief that the qualities that you have that you would kind of like to hang on to thank you very much are an innate part of you, rather than something that has been learned and cultivated over time. So instead of reaching, expanding, learning, we spend our time describing, documenting and defending. And what’s more, we most certainly don’t put ourselves in positions where we could potentially be challenged or come unglued. After all, if we are out to prove something, it’s become so much more than the activity or event; now it’s about who we are as people and as riders.

As a mindset and mental skills coach, one of the most common fears I hear about is the fear about what other people think.

“I hate it when people are watching from the sidelines, I just freeze up.”

“At the barn I ride at, there’s always a crowd. I’m pretty sure they are talking about me”

“I’m really afraid of getting it wrong and making a fool of myself”

Many times, this comes from the idea that we have something to prove. The thing is, setting out to prove yourself sees you working within a framework that is outside of your control and influence. The actual need to prove something implies that you are seeking approval from something or someone outside of yourself in order to allow yourself to feel a certain way. It’s a framework that sets you up for failure.

If you are looking for an approving glance, an admiring comment or any other form of validation from an external place, then you hold yourself at the mercy of a host of changeable and fluid forces- other people.

What’s more, if you feel like you have something to prove, you just as equally feel like you have something to lose. And if you feel like you have something to lose, then decisions which could potentially lead to your growth and development as a rider and trainer could be negated by concerns about the thoughts and opinions of others, and / or the possibility that you won’t be able to follow through in some shape or form.

The flip side of that? Improvement. If you goal becomes to improve, then you are operating in growth mindset territory. The recognition exists that in order to progress, increase your skill level and competency and move forward from where it is you are now to where it is that you want to be, you will need to learn to tolerate a degree of discomfort along the way.

If you read the stories of any of the great horseman (pick whichever one springs to mind!) and search back through time, no doubt you will discover a long history of trial, error and experimentation. You will see a focus that is motivated by “how can I learn to do this better?” or “what is the best way forward here?” You will see the idea of failure being almost irrelevant when juxtaposed against the possible learnings that will extracted from the same set of circumstances.

So the next time you find yourself stuck, confused or unsure how to proceed, check in with yourself. Are you out to prove or improve? The search for the latter will never let you down.

xx Jane

Dealing with Frustration & Managing Expectations

Oh yes, there’s nothing that can send us quicker into Camp Crappy than feeling of frustration. So what is frustration, and how can we navigate our way through it and around it?

The way I look at it is that frustration the inability to produce the specific result that you are seeking within the time frame you are seeking it. It’s something that we can feel both in the moment- so in specific training situations with our horses- and also generally, as an overriding feeling that clouds our ability to enjoy the present moment and warps our sense of possibility for the future.

Although the reasons as to why we might be feeling frustrated are individually specific, speaking generally there are a few likely culprits that come up in relation to frustration that tend to apply across the board.

Let’s have a look at those sneaky suckers now and more importantly, look at some ways that we can bust through to the other side.

Mindset: Are you attached to the result or focused on the process?

When it comes to goals and outcomes, my take on it is this; goals are there for the sole purpose of creating a line of positive tension between you and a experience, place or result you would like to see happen in the future. But setting the goal is only the preliminary step; what we then need to do is reverse engineer our way back to create an incremental, progressive and attainable way forward that allows us to experience a sense of progress and gradually expands our competency, confidence and possibilities for the future.

Goals in and of themselves are not fixed. The process that you define as a result of your goal is the ways and means for you to maximize your level of effort and get the most out of yourself, but it is not a benchmark for you to measure your self worth or your future capabilities against (more on this shortly!).

Frustration often arises when we become attached to the result at the expense or ignorance to the process. Essentially, the ability to attain a fixed result- be that a competitive outcome or a specific movement in training- is something that is outside of your control and influence, and for the most part, focusing your attention there is creating a framework that fails to set you up for success.

The only thing that is within your control and influence is the process. If you are feeling frustrated, accept the possibility that you are fixated on a result and instead think about what you might need to clarify, change or improve in your processes to maximize your chances of success.

Instead, get curious. The key to unlocking the vault of internal resourcefulness within is to ask yourself some empowering questions. And while we are on the topic, questions ARE actually the answer. Asking yourself good quality questions is definitely the way forward when it comes to breaking through any self-imposed, momentary limitations.

If you are having trouble producing the result you are wanting, here are some things to think about.

Does your horse know the answer to the question that you are asking?

How can you break things down into bite sized pieces?

What could you do to better set yourself up for success?

Who can you speak to or get help from that can help you find a solution to your current challenge?

In the context of what you are currently working on or where you find yourself, what is working for you right now?

Remember everything is feedback. Use it to your advantage to create a better plan for the future.

Time Frames: What’s the current target?

The next big kahuna in the frustration cycle? Time frames. Often it’s not our ability to produce a certain result that is in question, but the time frame that we are looking to produce that result in.

Like I said previously, it’s not necessarily your capacity to produce a certain result that is in question, but the time frame you have allowed yourself to attain that result in.

Again, pay attention to the processes, but also be mindful of dealing with the horse that you have in front of you and allowing yourself to respond compassionately and effectively to what they need from you also.

Comparisonitis: what’s the benchmark?

Beware of the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee (IBSC; more commonly recognized as the little, somewhat unhelpful voice inside your head that gets in the way of what it is you want to do or how it is that you feel about yourself). You know how I mentioned before that empowering questions are really the way forward? Well, the IBSC are kings and queens of asking disempowering questions. Here are a few examples that you may have seen floating across your brain space…

Why does this happen to me?

Why can’t I seem to get it together?

I’m the only one that can’t make it to work.

Why do I even bother?

Yep. We’ve all been there.

The thing is, this kind of mindset is pretty much a high end to nowhere except #campcrappy and ain’t no one got time for that.

Remember, the situation you find yourself, for better or for worse IS temporary and it ISN’T personal.

The thing that you have to do is get proactive, look for the opportunities and start to make a plan that moves you incrementally forward towards where it is you want to go.

Learn to recognize the Sweet Spot

I talked about it a lot in this blog so I want go and reinvent the wheel here, but it is important to understand that when you are in a learning zone, you aren’t going to be getting things “right” or “pulling it off” all of the time. In fact, the stats provided by those who study this sort of thing specifically tell us that when we are in the optimal training zone, 50% of the time we are capable of producing the result that we are looking for, and 50 % of the time, we are having trouble differentiating between our left and right leg (that wasn’t the specific example that they used but you get the gist). That’s the nature of learning. If it’s easy, chances are you already know it or aren’t venturing too far out of your comfort zone.

We need to learn to adopt a growth mindset and recognize that there is an inherent degree of uncomfortableness to being outside your comfort zone. Actually, one of my favourite things of late to say is that the amount of growth you experience is directly proportional to the amount of discomfort you are willing to tolerate. It’s true. I like it.

Right. So the next burning question- how do we deal with it when we are feeling frustration in the moment? ‘

Here’s my step by step “plan in a nutshell”…

  • STOP! Take a break. Breathe. That’s right. You owe it to your horse to be in charge of yourself. It’s not their fault that you are frustrated and it’s important that we don’t let our emotions overcome us to the point of negative ramification for either of us. So just stop. Get off if you need to. Take some time out and break the pattern. It will only take a few moments but you will feel better for it (and your horse will thank you).
  • Redirect your focus. What’s working? What specifically is the problem? How can you break it down to set you and your horse up for success?
  • Make a plan. Your plan might not be to address the specifics in the moment. Go back to what it is that you can both do well so you end the session on a good note, with the mindset of asking those with more knowledge than you how you can approach the challenge next time. It may also be a case of managing your expectations. Do you need to reset the time frames that you are working within? Are you too focused on the outcome and not the process? How can you make this happen?

Feelings of general frustration

If you are finding yourself feeling generally frustrated, it’s a good idea to make a plan and rethink your approach. Chances are you are getting ahead of yourself and need to break things down into incremental chunks; that you are being way too hard on yourself and are using the results (or lack of) that you are currently experiencing as an indicator of your self worth and capacity to produce the result in the future or your focus is on things that are outside of your control and influence.

Again, it comes back to those awesome questions; what is it specifically that is making you feel this way? And what is the one best thing you can do to get you moving forward?

Don’t be an island. Draw on the people around you. Ask questions. Think of it as an adventure. And make a plan.

It’s just a moment in time. You’ve got this.

xx Jane

Dealing with Anxiety In The Saddle with Jane Pike & Warwick Schiller

Session Recording

]Thank you to everyone who took the time to join us live or watch the recording. We really hope it was useful to you and you are able to apply some of the principles we shared to improve your riding life and your partnerships with your wonderful horses. Both Warwick and myself have programs available which offer in depth approaches and support in line with what we discussed and our area of expertise. If you are interested in finding out more about how to work with either of us, the links below will take you to the programs we offer and how you can sign up. We would love to have you join us!

Subscribing to Warwick Schiller’s training library gives you access to over 450 full length, unedited, unchoreographed, real time training videos, and over 2 hours of new footage is added each month. Warwick’s process is duplicable for you at home with your own horse. The videos are structured in the order of Warwick’s process – this works for any breed of horse for any discipline and for any level of handler/rider. Click here to learn more or to sign up!

JoyRide is my membership program that takes you through a comprehensive and practical process for creating confidence and managing your mindset specifically for equestrians. Joining JoyRide gives you access to weekly modules comprising video or audio tutorials (or both) as well as workbooks, sheets and action plans that will give you the skills to cultivate confidence, effectively manage your mindset and build mental strength for both in and out of the saddle, plus loads of live training and in house support from me. You can check it out or sign up here. And if working 1:1 is more your bag, we can do that too! Click here to read about the options.